Pandemic Legacy: July – September

Pandemic Legacy has brought us twist after twist, and we’re now more than half way through. Despite getting tougher each month, we’re loving how this game can keep us on our toes!

July – Attempt 1

Objective: Cure three diseases and complete two other objectives, either eradicate one disease, build a military base in each of the six areas on the board, quarantine seven faded cities or find the Virologist in a faded city containing a research station.

Team Players: The Colonel(Arran), The Quarantine Specialist (Claire), The Dispatcher (Mark), The Researcher (Viv)

Outcome: Failure

End of Game Upgrades: Paramilitary Escort for the Soldier, Air Strike added as an unfunded event (we have since realised that we accidentally applied an upgrade to a character that wasn’t in play!)

For July we removed the Operations Specialist, as due to end game upgrades we now automatically start with a military base in each region, so no longer need his ability. We instead swapped in the Colonel, who can remove faded figures, and who we decided would help us keep them under control.

We decided to try and find the Virologist quickly. While not a mandatory objective, it doesn’t go away until completed, so we figured that it was something we would need to do at some point in order to progress and would therefore be better off getting it out of the way.

Despite lots of red cards coming out (and therefore adding lots of faded figures) we found the Virologist quite quickly. Our second epidemic card caused a chain reaction from Tapai to Osaka, but we had cures for both the black and blue diseases in sight. After the cures, we quickly drew a third epidemic card which resulted in two outbreaks, and then the fourth epidemic caused four outbreaks meaning it was game over before we could cure yellow.

Not the best game for us, and we also decided that the Colonel was not as useful as we first thought, and decided to switch him out of the Soldier on our second attempt.

July – Attempt 2

Objective: Cure three diseases and complete two other objectives, either eradicate one disease, build a military base in each of the six areas on the board or quarantine seven faded cities.

Team Players: The Soldier(Arran), The Quarantine Specialist (Claire), The Dispatcher (Mark), The Researcher (Viv)

Outcome: Success!

End of Game Upgrades: Common Structure and Efficient to Sequence upgrades to the blue disease.

This time we didn’t have to find the Virologist, and as we had already completed the military base objective, we decided to try and eradicate a disease so we could upgrade it at the end of the game.

Starting with a number of black cards, I was tasked with finding the cure for black. I also drew a couple of event cards on my first turn, so things looked to be off to a good start. After the first round, our Researcher was looking good to cure blue, and I already had the cure for black ready to go and our first epidemic didn’t do too much damage.

The Soldier turned out to be very handy at keeping the faded under control so we sent him off to just wander around Asia while the rest of us worked on cures. On the second epidemic card, the infect stage placed 3 cubes on Washington. As we already had 3 cubes on Santiago, we used a funded event to remove Washington from the game, but Santiago still had an outbreak. We drew another epidemic card on the following round, and both Santiago and Lagos had outbreaks.

Most of the team had to move to damage control in South America, the cure for blue was sidelined, and the blue cubes were now increasing. Thankfully, a few good draws and clever maneuvering of cards meant that yellow was swiftly cured and the cure for blue was now in sight.

We know we need to eradicate a disease, but we’re also due another epidemic. We decided to move the Quarantine Specialist to a research station in Europe to quarantine all adjacent cities and remote quarantine the most at risk city in Asia. Whilst an epidemic was drawn, and Paris lost its quarantine, we avoided any more outbreaks.

Blue was quickly cured and we all moved to eradicate the disease, which we successfully completed in the following two turns.

August – Attempt 1

Objective: Cure three diseases and complete two other objectives, either build a military base in each of the six areas on the board, quarantine seven faded cities or find the Immunologist in a faded city that is rioting.

Team Players: The Soldier(Arran), The Quarantine Specialist (Claire), The Dispatcher (Mark), The Researcher (Viv)

Outcome: Failure

End of Game Upgrades: Veteran upgrade for the Researcher and Tactical Centres now online event on the Sydney city card

Our first run at August was the fastest game we have EVER played of Pandemic. Our first turn drew and epidemic card, resulting in five outbreaks, and Chicago, Mexico City and Lima becoming faded. Our third turn caused an outbreak in Tokyo, which cause chain reactions in Los Angeles and San Francisco – game over. We’ve never lost a game before where we didn’t even have all players complete one turn!